The Basics

What is a Green Building ?

Buildings have major environmental impacts over their entire life cycle. Resources such as ground cover, forests, water, and energy are depleted to construct and operate buildings. Resource-intensive materials provide the building envelope and landscaping adds beauty to it – in turn using up water and pesticides to maintain it. Energy-consuming systems for lighting, space conditioning and water heating provide comfort to its occupants. Hi-tech controls add intelligence to ‘inanimate’ buildings so that they can respond to varying conditions, and intelligently monitor and control resource use, security, and usage of fire systems etc. in the building. Water is another vital resource for the occupants, which gets consumed continuously during building construction and operation. Several building processes and occupant functions generate large amounts of waste.

Thus, buildings are one of the major pollutants that affect urban air quality and contribute to climate change. Hence, the need to design a green building, the essence of which would be to address all these issues in an integrated and scientific manner. It is true that it costs a little more to design and construct a green building. However, it is also a proven fact that it costs less to operate a green building that has tremendous environmental benefits and provides a better place for the occupants to live and work in. Thus, the challenge of a green building is to achieve all its benefits at an affordable cost.

A green building depletes as little of the natural resources during its construction and operation. The aim of a green building design is to:

It maximizes the use of efficient building materials and construction practices; optimizes the use of on-site sources and sinks by bio-climatic architectural practices; uses minimum energy to power itself; uses efficient equipment to meet its lighting, air-conditioning, and other needs; maximizes the use of renewable sources of energy; uses efficient waste and water management practices; and provides comfortable and hygienic indoor working conditions. It is evolved through a design process that requires all concerned –the architect and landscape designer and the air conditioning, electrical, plumbing, and energy consultants – to work as a team to address all aspects of building and system planning, design, construction, and operation. They critically evaluate the impacts of each design decision on the environment and arrive at viable design solutions to minimize the negative impacts and enhance the positive impacts on the environment. In sum, the following aspects of the building design are looked into in an integrated way in a green building:

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What is GRIHA ?

GRIHA is an acronym for Green Rating for Integrated Habitat Assessment. GRIHA is a Sanskrit word meaning – ‘Abode’. Human Habitats (Buildings) interact with the environment in various ways. Throughout their life cycles, from construction to operation and then demolition, they consume resources in the form of energy, water, materials, etc. and emit wastes either directly in the form of municipal wastes or indirectly as emissions from electricity generation. GRIHA attempts to minimize a building’s resource consumption, waste generation, and overall ecological impact to within certain nationally acceptable limits / benchmarks.

Going by the old adage ‘what gets measured, gets managed’, GRIHA attempts to quantify aspects such as energy consumption, waste generation, renewable energy adoption, etc. so as to manage, control and reduce the same to the best possible extent.

GRIHA is a rating tool that helps people assess the performance of their building against certain nationally acceptable benchmarks. It will evaluate the environmental performance of a building holistically over its entire life cycle, thereby providing a definitive standard for what constitutes a ‘green building’. The rating system, based on accepted energy and environmental principles, will seek to strike a balance between the established practices and emerging concepts, both national and international. The guidelines/criteria appraisal may be revised every three years to take into account the latest scientific developments during this period.

The Context and Development

Internationally, voluntary building rating systems have been instrumental in raising awareness and popularizing green design. However, most of the rating systems devised have been tailored to suit the building industry of the country where they were developed.

TERI took the responsibility of popularizing green building by developing a tool for measuring and rating a building's environmental performance in the context of India's varied climate and building practices.

This tool has been adopted by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy. This tool, by its qualitative and quantitative assessment criteria, is able to ‘rate’ a building on the degree of its ‘greenness’. The rating would be applied to new building stock of varied functions – commercial, institutional, and residential.

Hence, it is very important to define and quantify sustainable building practices and their benefits. It is also important to separate the role of different participants in ensuring that the building consumes minimal resources over its entire life cycle and leaves behind a minimal environmental footprint.

The basic features 

The system has been developed to help ‘design and evaluate’ new buildings (buildings that are still at the inception stages). A building is assessed based on its predicted performance over its entire life cycle – inception through operation. The stages of the life cycle that have been identified for evaluation are:

The benefits

On a broader scale, this system, along with the activities and processes that lead up to it, will benefit the community at large with the improvement in the environment by reducing GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions, reducing energy consumption and the stress on natural resources.
Some of the benefits of a green design to a building owner, user, and the society as a whole are as follows:

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Why was GRIHA developed and how ?

GRIHA was originally developed to provide a series of guidelines and benchmarks to those interested in construction of a sustainable and green building. It was understood that in order to develop a proper understanding of the elements of a green building and to then construct it, a comprehensive set of guidelines would be required to direct the interested party in the appropriate techniques and processes towards building a green building. It was designed as a point based system to give the interested party an approximation of how green the building would be.

The development process

GRIHA has been developed after a thorough study and understanding of the current internationally accepted green building rating systems and the prevailing building practices in India. The team has researched on several international rating systems. A few team members were also sponsored under a study tour by USAEP (United States Asia Environmental Partnership) to understand the eco-rating systems prevalent in the US. The team has vast experience in providing design assistance to green buildings in the country and long and varied experience in carrying out energy conservation studies in existing hotels, offices, and other commercial building. The team has effectively utilized the several multi-disciplinary strengths and experiences of the colleagues at TERI to arrive at the tools that addresses cross-cutting issues in the design, development, and operation of a green building.

The primary objective of the rating system is to help design green buildings and, in turn, help evaluate the ‘greenness’ of the buildings. The rating system follows best practices along with national/international codes that are applicable to achieving the intent of green design.

The MNRE has constituted a national and technical advisory committee comprising of emninent professionals and representatives from several government bodies to guide the evolution of GRIHA. The member list is as follows:

Members of National Advisory Committee

Members of the Technical Advisory Committee

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